Links: Thursday, December 18th

Today’s Links:

Why Female Authors Get Angry at Erasure – I’ve refrained from linking to the Konrath brouhaha because the man’s ego doesn’t need more attention, but this reaction from Beth Revis is worth reading for how it gets to the heart of the problem and how it’s not one you fix by suggesting books to read.

Recently, a male author who co-wrote an erotic romance novel put his foot in his mouth. He claimed, rather hyperbolically, that his book couldn’t have been written ten years ago, and that no book like his had ever been written before. You can read a succinct description here, or you can read the original post and comments here.

As much as the author’s blustering denies it, women have been writing erotic romance (yes, even erotic romance with all his stipulations—comedic, bdsm, etc., etc.—attached to it) before him. And despite his continued arguments about semantics and pedantic logic, he refuses to even acknowledge that what he said was insulting not only to erotic romance authors, but to women in general.

The Invisible Backpack of White Privilege is pretty decent, I guess. I’ve had one as long as I can remember. My parents said it just showed up in the mail when I was born, and L.L. Bean’s policy is to replace the backpack for free if it ever breaks, so I don’t have anything to compare it to. It’s $8 extra to get your initials monogrammed, which I personally think should be free of charge. The backpack comes in different colors, more recently Irish, Italian, and Buffalo Plaid.

The Invisible Backpack of White Privilege is great for carrying questionable things like weed, Ponzi schemes, and sex crimes. I have lived in dense urban areas my whole life, and the cops never once search my Invisible Backpack. Then again, that’s probably just because, like people always tell me, I have a really trustworthy vibe as a person.

Eight-year-old Dakota Nafzinger attends Gracemor Elementary School. Rachel Nafzinger said school staff took away her son’s cane as punishment for bad behavior on the bus and then gave him a swimming pool noodle to use as a substitute.

The school wouldn’t go on camera, but North Kansas City School District Spokeswoman Michelle Cronk confirmed taking away Dakota’s cane, calling it school property that was given to him when he enrolled. They said they took it away after he reportedly hit someone with it and wanted to prevent him from hurting himself or others.

If you enjoy the holidays but cringe at the do-goodiness of sappy Christmas classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, you should immediately add Die Hard to your annual viewing repertoire. The 1988 action thriller opens on Christmas Eve (Run DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis” plays in the background), as hardened New York City cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) travels to Los Angeles to visit his kids and estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), who moved across the country for a job. Except instead of a romantic reconciliation at Holly’s office holiday party, McClane finds himself in the middle of a deadly terrorist hostage situation.

But wouldn’t running over broken glass barefoot rip your feet to shreds? Wouldn’t McClane break his neck falling down the stairs? Is it really possible to bungee jump 100 feet with a fire hose tied around your body and live to tell the tale?

Those, notably, are just the high-profile names — the big, extreme cases that made the news. Women tend not to talk about the the steady, inevitable trickle of lesser threats, the things that are “just wallpaper to me now,” as one feminist writer told The Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg in August. Few achieve the notoriety that Zelda Williams or Anita Sarkeesian or Monica Lewinsky do.

“Zelda has become this poster child,” Pozner, the head of the advocacy group Women in Media and News told The Post in August, “but what that overlooks is that Twitter, in particular, has become a place for abuse, and for women and people of color in particular. The company knows it and has done precious little.”

Ridley

An ice hockey fan from north of Boston and the genre's most beloved troll, Ridley enjoys reading contemporary and historical romance, as well as the odd erotica novel. As someone who uses a wheelchair, she takes a particular interest in disability themes.

lawless

I’ve concluded that tolerating abuse is part of Twitter’s business strategy. I haven’t experienced any abuse personally and I still use Twitter, but I give them a massive side-eye and don’t trust them in the least in that regard.

Love in the Margins is a group romance blog trying to hit on the love stories that represent us all. We welcome discussion and criticism as we read through the stories of those whose lives don’t fit into the neat and tidy box labeled “default.”